A Usable Past

Convinced that the world is in big environmental trouble, Jared
Diamond offers readers a hefty tome that looks to the past to help
us face the future. A fuller title, Diamond says, would be
"Societal collapses involving an environmental component, and
in some cases also contributions of climate change, hostile
neighbors, and trade partners, plus questions of societal
responses." Several societies in the past have collapsed in
part because of environmental overexploitation, whereas others,
despite similar overexploitation, have survived. What makes the
difference between collapse and survival? Diamond argues that by
examining the environmental problems of past societies and analyzing
how they either escaped or succumbed to them, we can learn useful
lessons for our own times. In this way he aims to help us recognize
the seriousness of the planet's environmental condition and to
provide what historians sometimes call "a usable past," so
as to raise the chances that we can rescue the situation and avoid a
very unpleasant fate, the mother of all collapses.

Combing the past for episodes that provide salutary lessons for the
present is something historians, and others, have done for ages, but
more often in international relations than in other realms of human
endeavor. Environmental historians (a small but rapidly growing
subset of historians and like-minded scholars in other disciplines)
have normally resisted this urge, but then they typically work on
projects of such small scale that drawing parallels or lessons
becomes surpassingly difficult.

The scope of Diamond's project is sprawling. He roams over the
entire planet and across millennia, as he did in his
Pulitzer-prizewinning bestseller, Guns, Germs, and Steel.
The method employed in the two books is similar, as he explicitly
notes. By comparing the environmental histories of several societies
that either did or did not collapse, and by examining what he calls
"input variables"—of which more below—he aims
to "tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses."

The variables Diamond refers to are five considerations that
together he calls a "five-point framework" for analyzing
the environmental evolution of societies: the degree and nature of
environmental damage; the degree and nature of climate change; the
level of hostility of neighboring societies; the degree of reliance
on friendly trading partners; and the nature of a society's
responses to its environmental problems. In offering this framework,
Diamond goes beyond simplistic formulations about ecological
collapse, recognizing that environmental deterioration always
operates as a force among other forces, and sometimes in synergistic
conjunction with other forces. Historians and social scientists will
probably see the framework as imperfect for its neglect of other
variables—which are legion—that can contribute to
societal collapses. But a complete roster of potentially relevant
variables leads to an unworkably complex model, and Diamond's has
the virtue of simplicity.

The framework shapes his presentation of Parts I and II of the book,
which consist of case studies of Montana, Easter Island, Pitcairn
and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon, the Classic
Maya, the Norse in Iceland and Greenland, the New Guinea highlands,
Tikopia, and Tokugawa Japan. These treatments range in length from
three chapters (for the Norse) to six pages (for highland New
Guinea). They are selected for their salutary value or (for the
cases of Montana and New Guinea) because Diamond liked these places
and already knew something about them.

Other parts of the book ignore the five-point framework and indeed
are tangential to the theme of collapse. In Part III, for example,
Diamond includes chapters that review very recent environmental
trends in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, China and Australia. The
chapter on the two countries that make up the island of Hispaniola
aims to show that similar environments can be brought to different
outcomes by differing management. Here Diamond wrestles effectively
with the fact that someone as unsavory as the Dominican politician
Joaquín Balaguer did some good things for the environment (as
did Hitler). The chapters on China and Australia are fairly orthodox
summaries of current problems, leavened, especially in the case of
Australia, by a wealth of anecdotes. Part III also includes a
chapter on Rwanda, which emphasizes population pressure in
explaining the massacres of the mid-1990s. Even the unhappy cases of
Haiti and Rwanda are far from collapses in the sense that the word
is used throughout the book. These four chapters almost seem like
part of another book.

Part IV makes intermittent reference to the notion of collapse and
the five-point framework. But it includes a 44-page chapter on good
and bad environmental practices by big businesses involved in
resource extraction. This chapter, although it does provide sensible
explanations of why corporations behave as they do, makes no effort
to address the themes of the book. Diamond's justification for
including it—that corporations are important and that they are
not all the same and not all bad—although true, seems
insufficient. At any rate, Chevron will be happy he wrote it,
whereas the defunct Canadian mining company Pegasus Gold, had it not
declared bankruptcy to avoid paying environmental cleanup costs,
would not.

In the end the book's structure seems a trifle ungainly, lacking the
elegant proportions that helped make Guns, Germs, and Steel
the success it is. But Collapse is clearly intended for the
popular audience that embraced the earlier book. The writing is
often reportorial, even chatty, spiced with anecdotes, asides
(including half a page on Dominican baseball players), a fair bit of
personal reminiscence, recounted conversations with friends and
travelogue. There is not a pollen diagram or a soil-loss equation to
be found. The book is written so that readers without any background
in ecology or history can understand it, no mean achievement. Only
rarely—in the discussion of the relevance of population to
today's environmental problems, for example—did I think
Diamond made matters too simple.

An accessible style can of course convey new and interesting ideas.
The core ideas here are the five-point framework as a means to
understand the role of environmental degradation in past societal
collapses, and the relevance of the experience of ancient and
low-technology societies to the modern world. The first helps
ratchet up the rigor with which scholars think about the linkage,
albeit from a low baseline: The propensity to explain societal
collapse in environmental terms in recent decades is usually in
inverse proportion to how much is known about the collapse. The
five-point framework is an improvement on the breezy connections
that historians have often made about the collapse of the Maya,
Mycenaean Greece or the ancient civilization of the Indus Valley. I
suspect that archaeologists and geographers, who by and large have
been more circumspect in this department, will be less inclined to
regard the five-point framework as a useful tool.

The second idea is not new. Many a scholar has suggested that the
collapse of previous societies holds lessons for our own, and not a
few have seized on the case of Easter Island as a suitably
instructive microcosm. (The best of this genre is Paul Bahn and John
Flenley's Easter Island, Earth Island [1992], updated as
The Enigmas of Easter Island [2003]—a book
Diamond properly relies on heavily.)

At many points Diamond argues that it is useful to consider the
fates of ancient, low-tech, small-scale societies even though they
were all fundamentally different from our own. He argues that with
respect to the Maya, the parallel to today's societies is stronger,
because they were numerous, technologically sophisticated (for their
time) and sociologically complex. I am among those who believe we
can learn useful lessons from the past, but I am sure many readers
will remain unconvinced that knowledge of the prehistoric
Polynesians or the ­medieval Norse carries any practical value.

The most convincing case for the relevance of past collapses is that
of the Greenland Norse, to whom Diamond devotes two full chapters.
Here he broadly follows the interpretation advanced by Thomas
McGovern, according to which the settlement after some 450 years
went extinct in the early 15th century because of social rigidities
that prevented the Norse from adapting both to a cooler climate and
to the cessation of trade links to Scandinavia—in short,
rigidities that prevented them from living like the Inuit, on
abundant stocks of fish, seals and whales. It is an interpretation
in which the five-point framework shows its worth, although one in
which actual environmental deterioration played only a modest role.
These chapters are a wonderful, and to my mind convincing, account
of the fate of the Greenland Norse. Here, as throughout the sections
on past societies, Diamond has relied on the best authorities
(mainly archaeologists) and has done his homework well.

As do most large books, this one suffers from some inconsistencies
and minor inaccuracies. On page 11 the fifth point of the five-point
framework is a "society's responses to its environmental
problems." But on page 14 it becomes a "society's
responses to its problems, whether those problems are environmental
or not." Diamond writes on page 396 that Australians in the
1950s "looked fearfully at ... Indonesia with its 200 million
people," but in the 1950s Indonesia had fewer than 100 million
people (feared or not). And it is not (yet) the case (despite his
claim to that effect on page 494) that "AIDS-affected African
countries" are experiencing negative population growth. The
world maps in Collapse are Mercator projections that make
Greenland appear larger than South America. Writers who draw from a
dozen scholarly disciplines are bound to take a few false steps, and
Diamond's are small ones: None of the imperfections affects the
validity of the arguments on offer.

Scholars deeply versed in the linkages between environment and
society will probably find much of Diamond's work here familiar, at
least in outline. They are less likely than others to be swayed by
his (or anyone's) arguments, having made up their own minds already,
but even they, I suspect, can find interesting and new details in
almost every chapter.

But it is the general public to whom Diamond has pitched his book.
Although Collapse may lack the cohesion of Guns, Germs, and
Steel, Diamond's skill in making complex ideas easily
accessible suggests that this book too will have a wide readership.
It certainly deserves to. If it succeeds in sparking more public and
political consideration of environmental difficulties, that would be
welcome enough. It may well do more and bring a historical
perspective, hitherto often sorely lacking, to environmental
thinking, as well as raise the intellectual standard with which
questions of linkages between environment and society are considered
in the public sphere. That would be a rare achievement indeed.